Hanba! from Poland - NY Debut

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Hanba! from Poland - NY Debut

HAŃBA!

In the year 1931 in the Cracovian quarter of Podgórze a new street band came into being. Far from ordinary, it was a group of defiant musicians who decided to use their song to denounce the corruption, violence and iniquity of interwar Poland, a reality far more complicated than one could imagine today. The Rebellious Street Band Hańba! [‘disgrace’] is a musical and literary fiction, designed to convince the audience that punk-rock was not born in the noisy seventies on the British Isles,

but goes way back to the Second Polish Republic, a period marked by extraordinary cultural, artistic and economic growth, but also systematic destruction of democracy, the authoritarian rule of Sanation and its imperialist impulses. With the support of street instruments (banjo, drums, accordion, tuba) and a bunch of interwar poets (Tuwim, Brzechwa, Broniewski), four Cracovian performers impersonate imaginary characters and combine musical inspirations

(punk, folk, klezmer) to tell their own tale about the most poetic period in the history of Poland.

Their debut long-play album was released in a CD and a vinyl format at the beginning of February 2016 (or 1936, as they would have it), produced by a legendary Polish independent record label Antena Krzyku (www.antenakrzyku.pl) in cooperation with Karoryfer Lecolds (www.karoryfer.com).

The first song to be accompanied by a video clip is “Gmachy” [‘edifices’].

https://youtu.be/Aui13gGzk0Q, created by Michał Sikiewicz and Gabriela Szewczyk, artists engaged in a collaborative project collodion.pl, who also designed the album artwork. It features classic wet plate collodion photographs, taken in such locations as the former St Michael’s Prison in Krakow.

In 2013 Hańba! received an honorary mention for the song composed to Julian Tuwim’s poem (Dom Literatury in Łódź) and in 2014 it received the Czesław Niemen Special Award at the 17th New Tradition Festival in Warsaw, organised by Polish Radio 2.

In early 2014 the band participated in the project Granie ze Spolem – Alternative Music as a Means of Promoting the Social and Economic Potential of Cooperative Welfare, which assembles bands that refer to the idea of cooperative activities in their song lyrics. The album Zespolenie, which grew out of that project, includes Hańba!'s song Do roboty (Down to Work). The band received the Czesław Niemen Special Award in the aforementioned Polish Radio Folk Music Competition New Tradition (Nowa Tradycja), for “bold artistic idea and expression”. In an informal ranking of journalists specializing in folk music, published by the Folk24.pl website, Hańba! was unanimously proclaimed the artist of the year 2014 and debut of the year, while its album – as the most anticipated event of the following year. The band has performed, among others, in Germany and Czech Republic, as well as Polish festivals: Skrzyżowanie Kultur (Cross Culture Festival) in Warsaw, Mikołajki

Folkowe (Folk Mikołajki) in Lublin, and Slot Art in Lubiąż.

In 2015 Hańba! performed at a number of festivals, amongst others the Off Festival in Katowice and the 36. Euroradio Folk Festival – EtnoKraków. Their concert in Nikiszowiec was recorded by KEXP.